In this exercise, you will load a filtered gapminder
dataset - with a subset of data on global development from 1952 - 2007
in increments of 5 years - to capture the period between the Second
World War and the Global Financial Crisis.
Your task: Explore the data and visualise it in both static and animated ways, providing answers and solutions to 7 questions/tasks within this script.
First, start with installing and activating the relevant packages
tidyverse, gganimate, and
gapminder if you do not have them already. Pay
attention to what warning messages you get when installing
gganimate, as your computer might need other packages than
gifski and av
## ── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
## ✔ dplyr 1.1.4 ✔ readr 2.1.5
## ✔ forcats 1.0.0 ✔ stringr 1.5.1
## ✔ ggplot2 3.5.1 ✔ tibble 3.2.1
## ✔ lubridate 1.9.4 ✔ tidyr 1.3.1
## ✔ purrr 1.0.4
## ── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
## ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## ✖ dplyr::lag() masks stats::lag()
## ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors
First, see which specific years are actually represented in the dataset and what variables are being recorded for each country. Note that when you run the cell below, Rmarkdown will give you two results - one for each line - that you can flip between.
## tibble [1,704 × 6] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)
## $ country : Factor w/ 142 levels "Afghanistan",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
## $ continent: Factor w/ 5 levels "Africa","Americas",..: 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 ...
## $ year : int [1:1704] 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 ...
## $ lifeExp : num [1:1704] 28.8 30.3 32 34 36.1 ...
## $ pop : int [1:1704] 8425333 9240934 10267083 11537966 13079460 14880372 12881816 13867957 16317921 22227415 ...
## $ gdpPercap: num [1:1704] 779 821 853 836 740 ...
## [1] 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007
## # A tibble: 6 × 6
## country continent year lifeExp pop gdpPercap
## <fct> <fct> <int> <dbl> <int> <dbl>
## 1 Afghanistan Asia 1952 28.8 8425333 779.
## 2 Afghanistan Asia 1957 30.3 9240934 821.
## 3 Afghanistan Asia 1962 32.0 10267083 853.
## 4 Afghanistan Asia 1967 34.0 11537966 836.
## 5 Afghanistan Asia 1972 36.1 13079460 740.
## 6 Afghanistan Asia 1977 38.4 14880372 786.
The dataset contains information on each country in the sampled year, its continent, life expectancy, population, and GDP per capita.
Let’s plot all the countries in 1952.
…
We see an interesting spread with an outlier to the right. Explore who it is so you can answer question 2 below!
## # A tibble: 1 × 6
## country continent year lifeExp pop gdpPercap
## <fct> <fct> <int> <dbl> <int> <dbl>
## 1 Kuwait Asia 1952 55.6 160000 108382.
Next, you can generate a similar plot for 2007 and compare the
differences
…
The black bubbles are a bit hard to read, the comparison would be easier with a bit more visual differentiation.
scale_x_log10()) on the x axis? (hint: try to comment
it out and observe the result)Fix Figures 1 and 2: Differentiate the continents by color, and fix the axis labels and units to be more legible (Hint: the 2.50e+08 is so called “scientific notation”. You want to eliminate it.)
Answer: What are the five richest countries in the world in 2007?
## # A tibble: 5 × 6
## country continent year lifeExp pop gdpPercap
## <fct> <fct> <int> <dbl> <int> <dbl>
## 1 Norway Europe 2007 80.2 4627926 49357.
## 2 Kuwait Asia 2007 77.6 2505559 47307.
## 3 Singapore Asia 2007 80.0 4553009 47143.
## 4 United States Americas 2007 78.2 301139947 42952.
## 5 Ireland Europe 2007 78.9 4109086 40676.
The comparison would be easier if we had the two graphs together,
animated. We have a lovely tool in R to do this: the
gganimate package. Beware that there may be other packages
your operating system needs in order to glue interim images into an
animation or video. Read the messages when installing the package.
Also, there are two ways of animating the gapminder ggplot.
The first step is to create the object-to-be-animated
…
This plot collates all the points across time. The next step is to
split it into years and animate it. This may take some time, depending
on the processing power of your computer (and other things you are
asking it to do). Beware that the animation might appear in the bottom
right ‘Viewer’ pane, not in this rmd preview. You need to
knit the document to get the visual inside an html
file.
…
Notice how the animation moves jerkily, ‘jumping’ from one year to the next 12 times in total. This is a bit clunky, which is why it’s good we have another option.
This option smooths the transition between different ‘frames’, because it interpolates and adds transitional years where there are gaps in the timeseries data.
The much smoother movement in Option 2 will be much more noticeable if you add a title to the chart, that will page through the years corresponding to each frame.
Now, choose one of the animation options and get it to work. You may
need to troubleshoot your installation of gganimate and
other packages
transition_states() and transition_time()
functions respectively)gapminder_unfiltered dataset or
download more historical data at https://www.gapminder.org/data/ ]Answering this question is quite difficult exclusively using the given simplified data in the gapminder package. I will though answer this question looking at the life expectancy in the year 1997 and 2007, as life expectancy is more applicable when looking at the general population, than GDP per capita for example. In the above example from 1952 where Kuwait had a way higher GDP per capita than any other nation, the reason was that Kuwait in the period had large oil exports compared to the rest of the world, and at the same time had a rather small population. The good thing about looking at average life expectancy, is that the full population will be represented in a more truthful way. Though we are looking at an average, and the life expectancy is probably higher for the upper classes, the lower class in most, if not all countries will be more populous and in that way represented in a more direct way, as the averages are calculated with individuals in mind.
As we can see above the life expectancy has gone up in all continents. It should also be said though that i cannot be concluded that the world is a better place today exclusively looking at this metric. To really say anything insightful about this question one would have to do meticulous research, considering a large number of factors, as it is a very complex and many-faceted topic. But we can say, that life expectancy has gone slightly up, and that people therefore must have gotten healthier between my “Birth year” and “today”.